Described is a technology by which software program feature usage is located within a sequence of commands collected during program usage sessions. For example, feature generally corresponds to a series of commands, such as copy and paste. A visual modeling component is controlled via drag-and-drop operations to describe a feature model, which is then compiled by a compiler into a finite state machine. Noise models may be used to exclude any command in the sequence that is irrelevant to the feature usage. A recognition process uses the finite state machine to locate program feature usage within the sequence of recorded commands by matching command sub-sequences corresponding to the feature model via the state machine. An analyzer may then use the located matches to provide an analysis report on feature usage.